The Thing With Feathers review well-intentioned adaptation of Max Porter novella about grief

"Adapted by writer-director Dylan Southern from Max Porter's novella Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, it stars Benedict Cumberbatch who gives a well-intentioned performance as a children's author and graphic novelist. Living a middle-class existence in London, he is suddenly widowed; one of the movie's off-target qualities is its refusal to specify the cause of death or even show us clearly what his wife looked like, which in real life would be unbearably vivid facts."

"Left to look after their two young boys, he succumbs to a kind of breakdown, and hallucinates a giant nightmarish crow, which after a while the boys can sense too. The crow is derisively voiced by David Thewlis, and resembles the Ted-Hughes-ish illustrations Cumberbatch was working on. It sneeringly, ruthlessly mocks and jeers at his sad dad anguish; while everyone else is walking on eggshells around him, perhaps making things worse, the brutal crow jabs its beak into his psychic wound."

"The film has some cliches: the cartoonishly misjudged and intrusive gesture of sympathy by a school-gates mum, and the solo pushing of a trolley around a supermarket which morphs into a bad dream. The death-totem crow is not cliched, exactly, though it did remind me of Daina O Pusic's comparably unsatisfying film Tuesday, which offered a giant macaw as a symbol of death."

The film follows a suddenly widowed children's author and graphic novelist living in middle-class London as he collapses under grief while caring for two young boys. He experiences a breakdown and hallucinates a giant, nightmarish crow that eventually becomes perceptible to his children and taunts him with derisive cruelty. Performances include a well-intentioned turn from Benedict Cumberbatch and a sympathetic supporting role from Sam Spruell. The movie withholds specifics about the wife's death and appearance, leans on some clichéd scenes, and uses a special-effects crow that often feels self-conscious and undermines the drama's affecting moments.

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